skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't realize RH was the most valuable brokerage firm in the US!

I understand their business model. They would lose their only revenue stream if they routed themselves.
Maybe. Part of the problem currently, is there are too many short positions compared to the total issued shares. It’s what makes this a short squeeze. If you try to short now you’ll help elleviate the squeeze, though you may have problems finding people to lend the stock to short. But what makes shorting even scarier right now is the price is based on the marginal willingness to sell right now, vs the marginal willingness to buy + the forced buying due to margin calls. There is a major assymmetry that is driving the stock to positive infinity. And while we both know the price can’t go to infinity, we can’t be sure that a short right now won’t have it’s margin called due to all the margin calls before triggering a margin call on the stock just shorted. So risk is very real for a short at the moment, and you need a lot of cash reserves to try to weather the current situation.
> This sort of hand-waving dismissals of Tesla's innovations

Lots of things are innovative about Tesla vehicles but a steering yoke isn't one of them. It's a very old concept car trope, going as far back as the 1950s.
"the structure of the network itself would be represented in the silicon" -- ASICs then? perhaps even hybrid analog/digital one, where fixed coefficients are stored in digital memory, while input data is analog.

I believe there is a great value in being able to "snapshot" the state and later load exactly the same state into millions of devices. And I cannot see how this will easily work with memristors.
Reactionary perhaps. Irrational is unfair, I feel.

We, anyone who knows what an article titled "Protocols, Not Platforms" is probably about... our discussions have failed to have enough impact outside of niche. People see there is a problem. "Marketplace of ideas" is somewhat of a hard sell . As you say... mismanaged cesspits, but also monopolies. Also, "marketplace" is more euphemism than metaphor when referring to a handful of click-optimizing algorithms.

I'm on the fence, but don't tend to think whatever the current politics does give more power to those companies who fucked up the system in the first place.

Facebook and Twitter were already in an uncanny valley of free speech. It has been, Free speech at their discretion all along, and this wasn't a theoretical problem. At least now it is clear what we are looking at.

In any case, this post in on point. It's disheartening that decades into this discussion we have not had enough impact that politicians even know what the hell we are talking about. Twitter doesn't need to be regulated. It just needs to die. Twitter does not need to be a company. It's already basically a protocol. Free the protocol. Discard the company. They are not needed.
Dude it's my fuckin' money. I don't need or want protection. Maybe I want to buy a couple hundred dollars of meme stonks solely because it's funny. Is that not allowed?
Here's the part of this that is actually worse than it seems at first:

RH is making it so you can ONLY sell the stocks. You can't buy them.

So who is on the other side of the trade? Definitely not anybody on RH. But the thing is: a lot of the retail buy side of this is coming from RH. Like RH just gutted the buyers and handed them to the sellers. It's unbelievable how corrupt this looks.
> If a customer falls down on a trade, it is ultimately liable.... Robinhood induced them to buy through its gameified interface

Why would robinhood be any more liable than other online traders like Fidelity or etrade?

> What I can guarantee is nobody shorting GameStop got Robinhood to pull the plug.

How can you guarantee that? Robinhood likely routes most of it's trades through citadel, which has informed partners it will not be fulfilling GME or AMC or BB trades.

And it turns out Citadel is also a hedge fund that has massive short positions on GME.
meh. There is nothing new under the sun. There have been several identical losses in FOSS. The bigger they are the better when this happens because there is enough volume and momentum to force a new FOSS branch. If it is a "tiny" FOSS piece, there are not enough champions to fight.

> So AWS was directly competing with Elastic, but *not taking the same responsibility for the open source project or investing in it as heavily as Elastic was*.

Eh? AWS could have killed ELK in 5 minutes. They chose to branch, and contribute it back. Several of the fixes and improvements are from AWS. Did the author want an IBM/CentOS takeover? Or, deny AWS to use Elastic but pretend to be FOSS?
It is a meritocracy, but some get to start at a chute, and some start at a ladder.
You are probably an outlier. Look at the average newbie on WSB. Look at the upvoted posts and comments. It is pure mania at this point.

I promise a ton of people are convinced this is their ticket and throwing in far more than play money.
Guarantee as soon as the hedge fund guys are all safely out of their positions and stopped their losses, Robinhood and the other retail brokerages will suddenly be like "Well, we did a great job and protected retail clients! All done with that trade limiting business. Back to normal, everyone."
> Also, by making trading so easy RH has a responsibility to protect amateur investors from making terrible financial decisions.

I strongly disagree with this. Nobody can know beforehand what is a good investment or not. The omnipresent disclaimer applies: "All investments involve risks, including the possible loss of capital."

The idea that the professionals know something that the rest of us don't, is quite controversial and there are many articles giving evidence to the contrary.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234025489_The_Activ...

This idea is also quite condescending (my own opinion, no references given).
Playing devil's advocate here (because I have weakly held opinions and no good answers of my own):

> There are a lot of projects (sudo being the most recent example) supported by a team of developers in the single digits (or just one) that are relied upon by projects raking in millions if not billions in annual revenue.

But they gave it away for free. That would be the same whether there were big, small or zero companies using the software.

I think probably the problem is framed wrong:

- maybe giving software away free was a bad idea (I don't believe this; just putting it on the table for conversation)

- maybe those giving away their software free should make better calls _for themselves_ about how they spend their time

- maybe use different licensing

- stop calling it free; instead call it "free a the point of consumption" and consciously build a model to support that at the outset (this is my current personal opinion, but I grew up in the Uk when it had a functional NHS so I'm biassed)

- dig deep on what both "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" mean to you and how they relate and what you want to do about that

Open source came out of a joyous utopianism that hasn't been backed up the wider societal changes needed to sustain it. This is understandable because that work is ridiculously hard (and I'm aware some people _are_ trying to make those changes. I just day-dream about it).

Currently, most of the world works on capitalism, for better or worse. I'm not trying to defend or attack capitalism here, but when you work in a capitalist system and _all_ your other interests and life support systems use capitalism, you have to factor that into your thinking. Open source makes more sense in a post-scaricity society and we're not there yet. FOSS might even help us get there, and the problems we're seeing in the past 3-4 years might be the signs of things changing.

I know this message sounds like victim blaming, and that's a real problem in some situations, but I don't think this is the situation here. Everyone working in tech is at a higher than average level of privilege than their immediate peers; working in FOSS is a choice you make from that position of privilege.
There are different traditions within topology. Cryptography is much larger.
Ultimately I think it's hard to come to a conclusion, since few people stick to a particular brand outside the Apple ecosystem. I think the only other bubble would be Thinkpads. So continuous comparison seems flawed anyway. On the other side, Mac users seem to be weirdly accepting of things not working out, the "you are not using it right" meme holds some truth from my observation.

Personally, I have bad experiences with newer Thinkpads and "QC" on dead pixels (lol, one shop won't sell to me anymore, because I keep finding dead pixels), which is why I was considering an M1 Mac for the first time. Sadly/gladly I found out about the various bricking issues in time. Let's see how Apple is going to handle these in the next months...
> China could pump out a million drones per day if they wanted to.

The US too

> It occurs to me that a simpler technology could be employed against drones: grapeshot.

Terrorists are dropping mortar rounds on armored vehicles from relatively high altitude using commercially available drones in the middle east and it looks very effective. If the US or China start mass producing advanced autonomous drone swarms you can be 100% sure no amount of grapeshot will save you.

Think about kamikaze vs US ships back in ww2, but you have hundred times the number of drones, they're smaller, faster, quieter, more lethal and you can barely detect them before they're on you. The grapeshot might work if you have 100 soldiers vs 1 drone, not in 100 vs 100 or 100 vs 1000
WSB have been yoloing their trades since forever.

This is some anticompetitive bullshit, plain and simple.
A recent poll of employees who are working remotely
I knew Bill Gates's family was well to do when he started with his endeavors, but I recently came to know Bill Gates Sr. was a prominent personality from Howard Schultz's account of him.

The story goes like this -

When Howard was offered Starbucks for US$3.8 million by original founders, he was working to raise funds for that and his current investors went over his back to buy Starbucks. Howard was introduced to Bill Gates Sr.(Lawyer) by a friend, who took Howard to the building where those investors were straight away and threatened them out of it immediately.
"An experiment is worth a thousand opinions" - Wernher Von Braun

Until these people actually try this steering wheel they should shut up.
Very clever, but the sensible thing to do is never rely on one-liners, lest you end up in this kind of situation. Get that thinking out of your head. Always write the script (that's why it's called "the script" ... ) in a file and use that.
There's something different about "organizing" raids in the public eye though.

There's no actual group consensus, no agreements, no negotiation, none of the processes that are required to actually "cooperate".

What happens is a a leader throws a bet at the wall and says "FOLLOW ME!". But no one is compelled or committed to any kind of action. This is the same thing as any analyst or short seller publishing their thesis and disclosing that they have a position. Its protected as freedom of speech.

Now, if the discord group or elsewhere have private circles about which stocks to raid and when, that is obviously a different matter. But I don't think that is the phenomenon that is occurring. This is a broader social movement.
It might be. But it is also dangerously close to market manipulation.

Thus, it is "controversial". That is the question I was answering.
Were the market shutdowns manual or automatic handbrakes? I know there are breaks when specific thresholds are hit that are pre-determined.
Many of the companies that appear to be "harvesting" their entrenched customers have not switched away from a FOSS license.

Examples:

• Apple

• Amazon

• Facebook

• Google

• Microsoft

• Netflix

• Red Hat
I’ve been saying the same thing so much that I should probably just get it tattooed on my forehead.

It’s crazy to think about the carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere in order to do the same computations over and over again. Same goes with layout and rendering on the client. There’s no reason we can’t just do this for a few standard widths and send that static content to the client.
Yeah there’s something going on here. But they don’t realize that the Streisand effect will be or in full force in this. People are going to freak.
Wow, I just made this exact same point. You and I must have similar experiences.
Oh that's crazy! Here in Chicago you can actually get a rebate from the government for using one![1]

[1]https://mwrd.org/rain-barrels
> In short, it would push the power and decision making out to the ends of the network, rather than keeping it centralized among a small group of very powerful companies.

This only creates that same echo chamber effect we are trying to avoid.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)
Progress Studies: A Discipline Is a Set of Institutional Norms
The same shorter is making money hand over fist on market making due to increased volatility, volume, and unsophisticated investors.
Just wanted to say that daily.co was crucial to my company during the early months of the lockdown. We had a fully integrated telehealth option deployed for our users in a weekend. You all are amazing!
The Laravel (PHP) community is using Livewire, which is like Hotwire. Phoenix (Elixir) also have something called LiveView.
I agree. The main thing I'm looking for in new hires is the ability to think logically, problem solve, and learn new things. I don't care whether you already know whatever languages or libraries we are using.
This is purely fundamental. As of this morning, short interest was still 139% of float - which means that there are still exist buyers who will pay any price, no matter how high - or default on their shorting obligation.

Is it anything but rational to buy something you know someone is willing to pay any price (at this point in time) with the intention of selling it later?
yeah Robin Hood was a creepy cynical marketing play from the start. good on them for convincing young people that they were a good choice despite being objectively worse than all other brokers. it's the free market at work! go use another broker if you dont like RH, trading fees have plummeted everywhere it's a years-long trend due to market regulation changes and HFT and low interest rates
These companies are still businesses. They won't care if you, a single retail investor, screw up and lose a lot of money. However it is dangerous for the future health of their business if a sizable portion of their retail investors take a bath on this, get turned off by that experience, and end up stop using the service.
Cool, so where are the articles, stories and studies from those other failed attempts? My point is they AREN'T in the article - that's all.
> There's magic about pressing "o" and typing in what you want to search from history or Google which is so fast and efficient.

I moved from linux+qutebrowser to macos+safari a couple years ago (mostly because I needed to for my work computer and was getting tired of fighting ableton+wine on my personal computer) but I really love qb (I even wrote a blog post on it: https://jamesbvaughan.com/qutebrowser). I miss a lot of things about it, with "o" being one of the big ones.

I know that I can use qutebrowser on macos, but using safari (with Vimari) just feels more integrated with the OS and my other Apple devices, and that's been something I've enjoyed more than I expected to.

Writing this is making me think I should give qb on macos another shot though...
Agree. My cynical mind like to think that there are a lot more people there who just want to make a quick buck and maybe get rich quick. Those people, who most likely bought GME early on, are hyping up the "hold strong on GME" motto and they will silently leave the fools to hold the burden. Whether it's sticking it to the Wall Street or not (actually, it's only affecting maybe a handful of hedge funds on Wall Streets; the big guys on Wall Streets are probably making a lot of money from this "movement"), A LOT of average Joe's will lose money here as well.
FWIW, I'm glad you posted this.

I think most people on HN have the breadth of experience to understand your main point. For example, many of us have extensive experience running communities and/or have seen how quickly bad actors will overrun even well-intentioned unmoderated communities.

Other folks here do not necessarily have this experience, don't see the extensive "gardening" that happens in the background of healthy online communities (see: dang), and believe that all human problems can be solved by implementation details like protocols.

There's the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Do HNers know of good resources for folks who only have a hammer, but want to develop a more holistic, humanistic understanding of online communities?
The military wants to build fully automated, lethal defense systems capable of destroying a large volume of targets

These already exist. Current models just target more-expensive drones, i.e. guided missiles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_rocket,_artillery,_and...

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a35034995/...
I mean, nothing material happened because of it. People got angry at the shadowy nebulous "Wall Street" instead of Obama who actually gave the bailouts.
idk signal where they would require a warrant to intercept the encrypted data and metadata vs telegram where they already intercepted data/ metadata that they can then use the metadata to get a FISA warrant to hack ur phone based on metadata. Signal is clearly better for Americans.
I called out Robinhood months ago in this old thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188407

basically its a shitty company that sells your orders so hedgefunds (citadel etc.) can then buy the same stocks at a lower price[1] and you always end up paying more, they were fined 65M for doing this see here[1]. A total scam and hopefully congress and the SEC come down hard on this company.

[1] - https://modernconsensus.com/technology/robinhood-high-freque...
[2] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robinhood-sec-fine-65-million/
'Why haven't you sold a startup by now? ... go do your own thing...'

Because, Since I was young, I've been hammering a cinderblock away that can grow 3 new heads at random intervals
It maybe used to be a Windows executable (or any other platform using the .exe extension), but it probably isn't these days - but of course they cannot simply move the script to a different place because it would break all existing counters.

You can still occasionally see this on some websites with old infrastructure or infrastructure that has grown over the years. For example if you book a train ticket in Germany through Deutsche Bahn, it will go through bin/query.exe!
How can I get list of textbooks being used in top colleges?
Let's say I wanted to find out what textbooks are being used in stanford graduate finance degree or something like that. How can I go about finding that out.
Why is it racist to document that house prices are influenced by racial demographics? Do the critics think there is no such influence, or just that house price models must ignore it?
Happy Data Privacy Day Everyone
Here's a post from my cofounder Laszlo Bock why protecting individual privacy is so important. He has a somewhat unique perspective- a refugee who fled communist Romania, to 10+ years on the management team at Google. Have a great day all!

https://gretel.ai/blog/protecting-our-digital-breadcrumbs
Wonder what it would be? Physical eg. flak or directional jamming/emp that would be neat. Or computer-vision tied with phased array lasers dang.

another one, atmosphere displacement so they can't fly
> Is it so hard to believe that at this point buying GME is more about activism than making profit?

Go read the top comments in the top WSB threads and tell me which it is.

This is all about getting rich quick with a thin veneer of activism slapped on top.

That might not have been the case a few days ago, I don’t know because I only got into the loop yesterday... but if it was 90% activism on Monday... is probably 10% activism today.

I wouldn’t touch that stock using “for real” money with a 50 foot pole.
Precisely. They use different wedge issue tactics to keep the populace divided and mollified, but the end game is in service of their own interests.
I just want to know how do you know for sure what those guys have been doing. Have they exposed all their trades? Are you saying that they were so stupid to not have hedged it?!

This is a hedge fund's game as it is for WSB.

It is the regular traders that have shorted via option that are losing money just the same. They are the most likely bag holders because they they don't hedge.

Don't assume all parties are truthful.
The service offered is something mouthful like "document cloud storage for sharing over the Internet billed for up to 2TB space", not 2TB of raw disk space.

And backend is always S3+Glacier which costs about $25/TB/month for storage and $100/TB for download, so not just that filling up your quota to the brim costs them more than twice as much as the what Dropbox charge for a 2TB quota, but overwriting and retrieving the files is going to seriously hurt their budget. Not your budget, none of your business, but that's how it works, that's why anyone other than them went bankrupt, and that's why they don't try to be nice to advanced users.
I'm a huge fan in figuring out how to stop setting so much money on fire in pursuit of education.
> The latter often leads to the familiar dependency hell when trying to install or upgrade the program.

Can you elaborate?

> I have frequent crashes, it’s slow at rendering pages, it uses more memory than (for example) chromium and seems to leak memory; any kind of CSS animation causes the CPU to have a major workout.

Those are indeed most likely caused by the underlying QtWebEngine in some way - though there also have been some performance improvements in qutebrowser itself, with some more planned: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues?q=is%3Aope...

> After one upgrade most video stopped working.

If you installed qutebrowser outside of Ubuntu's packages, that might be caused by the prebuilt Qt lacking proprietary codec support.

Despite that, it's what I'd recommend if you're on a Ubuntu LTS with often grossly outdated Qt versions:
https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/doc/i...

> I never cared about the ad blocker, as I use a hosts file for that. Why doesn’t everyone? It seems to be a better solution.

That's essentially what qutebrowser did before this release as well - but many ads and trackers are served from the visited page directly rather than a third-party host.
My understanding is that it isn't the loan that is banned but charging interest. A fairly simple workaround would then be to charge a monthly fee instead, and you would then end up with something that in practice is more or less the same.
Subway’s tuna is not tuna but a ‘mixture of various concoctions’ lawsuit alleges
Not just a U.S. phenomenon – the Reddit investing frenzy has spread overseas
> When the crisis hit, the firms got the blame, not their customers. Companies learned that helping their customers shoot themselves in the foot can come back to bite them, even if it was all legal and what customers wanted at the time.

That is a pretty gross oversimplification and completely dismisses the variety of "companies" that had a hand.

Subprime lending was just the foundation, but it took investors to investors to buy those securities, and ratings agencies to assign favorable risk ratings to those securities.